Author: Maria Lebed

Holidays provide a great opportunity for companies not only to sell more to repeat clients but also to acquire new customers. Together with a great opportunity to gain, comes a big chance to lose customers in the holiday season if you offer them bad customer service.

Customer service is almost always the first impression a customer will have with your company, so it is important to handle it the right way and not scare your customers away.

The survey says that 60% of consumers would be “unlikely or very unlikely” to give repeat business to a company that had given them bad service in the past.

And repeat customers that continue to support your brand over time will spend 67% more than new customers. So it is well worth it to give your time and attention to managing the busy customer flow well in the holiday season. >>>

The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is credited with saying “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

It is generally understood that the goal in customer service is to have effective communication with customers, which will result in customers being satisfied and will produce more revenue for the company in the end.
However, what is effective communication? What does it include and how a company can achieve it? Breaking down your plan into smaller sections which are easy to understand and convey to employees is the way to go.

On the whole, all those service failures cost to businesses in the United States $75 billion per year.

Losing income, however, is not the only consequence of losing a customer. Angry and frustrated customers can hurt your company in many other ways. For example, they can spread negative word-of-mouth about your company or leave negative online reviews in social media and other online resources.

One of the main reasons customers get frustrated and want to leave is when companies don’t respond to their service requests. >>>

Genuine customer feedback creates opportunities for companies to earn more loyal customers, those who know that they can speak out about their problems and that they will be addressed.

It also helps to:

measure customer satisfaction

improve products and services

show that you value customers’ opinions

create the best customer experience

establish reliable source of information to other consumers

collect data that helps taking business decisions

Most customers ignore survey requests unless they have something very positive or very negative to say. The main reasons for this are that surveys often reach customers at inconvenient time and the customer doesn’t see any real value for themselves in completing the survey. And even if the customer has taken the survey offered, this often results in very generalized responses, which don’t give you as a company much insight about the customer or what their interests and difficulties are. >>>

Have you ever encountered a situation when you would click the live chat button on a website promising instant online help and you would not reach anyone? I did. At other times, I would contact live chat support and instead of finding an answer to my question, I would be escalated to another person who would say that they will check the information and email me later.

I do understand that some questions take research and some issues take time to be diagnosed and fixed.

And still, I feel frustration in many such situations, especially when I have to explain the issue over and over again to another agent or repeat the same things in email later. As a customer, I want to be helped here and now while my question is still relevant and the issue is current.

Perhaps similar customer experiences are the reason first contact resolution remains an important metric in customer service. According to the Customer Experience Executive Report by CCW Digital, 70% of customers consider first contact resolution the most important factor when interacting with a company, yet only 10% of companies believe they excel at its delivery. >>>

What other benefits does proactive communication bring to a business?

At some moments customer service job can be a challenge. Dealing with different people and trying to meet their expectations is not an easy task. It takes patience, sharp intellect and I would even say wisdom to navigate through the various customer moods and still provide a professional service.

In this article I would like to review the biggest customer service challenges based on my own experience. I would like to share with you what I found worked best for me to overcome them and I hope my experience will be of use to you as well.

If you are aiming for excellence, you can never stop learning and polishing your skills. What skills are needed for a great customer service?

There is a long-running debate over which set of skills is more important for a customer service rep, soft skills or technical skills.

A recent survey by Service Strategies concludes that 96% of respondents judged communication skills and interpersonal skills more important than technical skills for the success in customer support. After all, to resolve any technical problem a CSR needs strong communication skills to effectively gather information, analyze it and find a solution which will help the customer.

As a live chat software provider, we saw many of our clients adding direct messenger links to their websites and missing on the opportunity to see additional details about their customers and improve the quality of their customer service. Direct links to the messenger, although they allow the customers to chat with the company, don’t have the capability to pass any information from the visitor’s browser.

While we are aware that some of the live chat tools available in the market today don’t have this feature, which may be the reason some of our customers are not expecting to see this functionality, we try to encourage our clients to utilize the chat tool to its full potential and make sure that they take advantage of the benefits that real-time monitoring offers. >>>

Chat etiquette plays a huge role in customer service. Professional and authentic interaction with clients goes far beyond the opportunity to make a sale. It helps to build a lasting relationship with the customer, inspire future communication and create fans and advocates of your brand.

How to treat the customer to be able to appreciate all these benefits and escalate your service to a more professional and human level?

Customer service training is the most important part in achieving these goals.

Professional line of communication is not that obvious to expect your service agents to get at it intuitively. It is especially true with new employees who often need help finding the proper style of communication which would stick with your business objectives and allow them to maintain their authenticity.

Below are some guidelines on how a service agent can best handle the major key points in a live chat conversation. >>>